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Mike Sandrock: How mindful running can help your training and your life

By Mike Sandrock

For the Camera

Posted:
03/06/2016 02:00:00 PM MST

A Kickstarter campaign through the end of March aims to bring the ideas of marathoner and meditation teacher Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche — at left above presenting the Living Peace Award to His Holiness, The Dalai Lama in 2006 — to a larger audience through the online course "Running with the Mind." Sakyong Mipham is head of Shambhala International meditation centers and groups, numbering 230 worldwide. (Cliff Grassmick / Staff Photographer)

Mike Sandrock

The best marathoners have always run with a "mind of meditation," although elites such as Boulder's Frank Shorter did not call it that when he was the best marathoner in the world during the 1970s, winning Olympic gold and silver medals and kick starting what has come to be known as the "Running Boom." Shorter would not have become Olympic champion if he had not run "mindfully."

And what does that mean, "mindfully"?

The term has become a social meme, springing up in daily conversations, from eating mindfully to parenting mindfully to living mindfully. In Shorter's case — and for other runners who make it to the top — it simply means paying attention to how their bodies, minds and emotions are responding to their training and racing. This leads to a philosophy, as another mindful great, Rob de Castella, — Track and Field News' best marathoner of the 1980s — used to say when he was living here, "Train smarter, not harder."

The reason is that success in long-distance running comes only from consistent training. Avoid injury and illness, put in some miles, and you will improve. Simple to say, hard to follow.

Many examples abound.

Shorter would focus on his two interval sessions a week, and a long run — 20 miles or 2 hours, whichever came first — and then run only as many miles on the off days as he "noticed" his body could handle. Dick Quax, one of New Zealand's "Golden Kiwis," told me once that if he had a workout planned, but got to the track tired or started to feel rundown, he would take an easy run and do the workout the next day.

Many of us, however, push through our workouts, because, by gosh, it is on the schedule, right there in black and white, and no way are we going to change. Or because we need to reach our 100-mile a week goal, or we have to keep a streak going. Alan Culpepper, the local two-time Olympian and former University of Colorado NCAA champ, would often run his recovery runs alone, to avoid the unmindful habit many runners have of running someone else's pace and going too hard on recovery days.

There are myriad mistakes we all make in running and in life. (A good definition of our species might be "The Mistake-Prone Biped.) The point is to notice when our overtraining or when too-fast or too-much of a workout leads to injury, fitful sleep or the flu, or we react with anger at someone, and then to understand why we acted that way.

These are all topics I covered on a recent run with Joshua Weinstein, program development manager of the new "Run with the Mind" online course. Springing out of local marathoner and meditation master Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche's bestseller "Running with the Mind of Meditation," the course is part of what Weinstein calls "the emerging movement in mindful athletics."

I told Weinstein how in my first interview with Sakyong Mipham, years ago when he was getting ready to race the Boston Marathon, the first question I asked was: "What is meditation."

He smiled and said the Tibetan word for meditation, "gom," translates as "gaining familiarity with."

Wait a second, I said. Aren't we already familiar with our minds? After all, we each live with our's every day, how could we not be familiar with our mind, ourselves, our thoughts, feelings and emotions?

In reply, the Sakyong asked if I and Camera photographer Dave Jennings would like some tea. He knew I did not know.

Weinstein chuckled when I related that story, saying the goal of launching "Running with the Mind" was to bring the Sakyong's (an honorary term meaning "Earth Protector") teachings to the millions of runners who are not able to attend his yearly running, yoga and meditation retreat in northwest Colorado.

The ideas in the book and in the new online course are simple, yet powerful.

One is that just as we need to build a base of aerobic training, so do we need a base of meditation. I was glad to read that even a master teacher like Sakyong Mipham had a discursive mind in his early years of learning meditation from his father, Chogyam Trungpa, the Tibetan llama who fled the Chinese occupation of Tibet. He ended up in Boulder, where he founded Naropa University.

The take-away message for me is Sakyong Mipham's statement, "Movement for the body, stillness for the mind."

It worked for Weinstein. He was a back-country skiing kind of guy down in the San Juans around Telluride. After receiving his master's in religious studies from Naropa, he read "Running With the Mind of Meditation" and started running.

"Yeah, this is something real, and that I can experience," he said he thought at the time.

Weinstein has helped launch a Kickstarter campaign for "Running with the Mind," through the end of the month. Through March 13, the ebook version of "Running with the Mind of Meditation" is discounted to $1.99. The book also is the next selection for the April 5 meeting of the Flatirons Running Book Club.

Added Weinstein: "Bringing meditation to my running and running to my meditation improved my running and developed my running. And something I did not expect, it improved my understanding of what meditation is all about."

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